Not because it’s brilliantly worded or anything — because if you see it on the web or in an official Twitter client (and if you’re logged in), it’ll look something like this:

Instead of a link to the signup page of our daily email — where you’d have to enter your information, wait to get a confirmation email, then click a link inside it — you get a supersimple one-click interface. Twitter already knows your email address, after all, so that’s prefilled in. Why make someone complete a form and a two-step authentication process when you can make it all easy? (My thanks to Justin for handling the mechanics of the signup process.)

Within about 15 minutes of sending that tweet out, we had about 50 new people signed up to our daily email. Within three hours, it was over 100. In the 10 days since, we’ve tweeted out the link a couple more times, and we’ve gotten 370 new signups in all. Not bad for a few minutes’ work. And a number of other people started doing the same:

It’s not perfect. The special interface won’t appear in non-official Twitter apps (like Tweetbot, which I use), and if you’re not logged in, it falls back to a link to your own standard subscribe page. But it’s a good enough tool that I’m surprised more publishers — particularly those with big Twitter followings — aren’t using it.

One reason publishers aren’t using Lead Generation Cards as much as they might is that it’s a little confusing. You need to have a Twitter Ads account to build a Lead Generation Card — but you don’t need to actually buy an ad.

@alexismadrigal Nope. You set it up via Twitter Ads, but no credit card needed.

You just build it in the Ads interface (Creatives → Cards → Create your first Lead Generation Card) then, instead of making it a Promoted Tweet, you just send it as a standard tweet within the same interface. Then you can use the same cards.twitter.com url in any future tweets you want to send. (A subscribe-to-our-email tweet also makes for a great tweet to pin to the top of your Twitter timeline.)

We’re probably something of an edge case, since we have lots of Twitter followers (about 157,000) and fewer email subscribers (about 16,500). But I think a lot of publishers could bump up their email subscribers with this tool. When I saw the email addresses of our new subscribers, I realized that we hadn’t done a particularly good job of cross-promoting our email to our Twitter followers; many of them probably didn’t even realize we had a daily email. I bet there’s some engagement gold to be mined in improving that cross-platform connection.

I am not a lawyer (particularly not a Canadian lawyer), but I would imagine that the fact that you’ve already logged into Twitter is enough of a permission process that it’s not spam. But I don’t know.

Olga Brilant

Fair however that is implied consent btw the user and Twitter as the relationship is btw Twitter and me, for example. I will do some digging as well..thanks!

johncooper01

Twitter is also a one of the most important and famous lead generation & audience targeting platform due to which we can reach out our niche market customers.

This is an important question since it seems the main benefit of this tool is to evade the need for double-opt-in procedures. Overall though it seems to honor the spirit of the CASL at least, certainly it’s not equivalent to a company signing you up for their list just because you bought something.

Rodninio

Thanks.

I re-read it and I still don’t think it’s clear – you talk about buying ads which are obviously distinctly different. Anyway, thanks for the clarification, I will give it a try.

After reading the longish article you linked to on the Mailchimp blog I realized it’s over a year old and sorely out of date. They replied in 5 minutes to my comment with a link to an updated article in their knowledge base with up-to-date instructions:

P.S. How are you enjoying the Disqus+WordPress integration in use on this site? On Global Voices we’re struggling with the fact that there’s no way to get the WordPress author an email notification when Disqus comments are added to their posts. I wonder if Joshua knows about the comment I left about the unhelpful link.